You Can't Walk Into An "Office Building"
Mmm, no,
a little smaller…Writing is freedom, or so say people who don’t write. We who ply the live action screen trade are all-too-familiar with the concept of restraint. Our limitation is that annoying little aspect of life known as “reality”. I used to think the choke collar of reality would tug the hardest when I was trying to dream big.
Hah. Totally wrong.
Reality’s endless jabbing annoys the most when I haven’t been dreaming at all.
Case in point: you cannot walk into an office building.
Try having a character “walk into an office building”. That’s fine for now. It’s fine ten drafts from now. But if you’ve done your job well and the stars align, you’ll find yourself sitting across a table from the 1st Assistant Director in the production offices of the film of your movie, and he’s going to ask you what the hell you mean.
“Now, are we talking skyscraper, suburban office complex, three-office law firm type thing, is it nice, run-down, art on the walls, cheeseball, full of doctors or large businesses or crappy accountants, does it have marble on the floors, receptionist, elevator or walk-up, is it imposing, diminished, old, new, light, dark, clean, dusty, crowded, empty…”
And no matter what you end up answering, the first answer in your head…the real answer is…”Umm, I don’t know.”
Gentlemen and women, the rubber has hit the road. Welcome to production.
While it’s true that all the niggling questions of production will ultimately be determined by the director, that doesn’t mean we can’t help guide the director and the production as they create the world of the film.
No, I’m not suggesting that we write all of this stuff into a script. That would be awful. What I am suggesting is that before you find yourself face to face with the 1st A.D. (the person who’s really the field marshal of the shooting set), you prepare yourself with the answers.
There are lots of ways that we screenwriters can find ourselves disappointed with the rendering of our stories. One of the most common is the “that’s not how I imagined it!” syndrome. Oh? And how did you imagine it?
If you imagined it specifically, and by “specifically” I mean that you could have supplied the 1st A.D. or the producer or the director with a document describing in detail your imagined locations, costumes, hair styles, car makes, and all the other tiny flecks of color in your neural painting…then yeah, you get to be disappointed.
If you didn’t, then one of two things is true. Either you knew everything but decided not to speak up, in which case…your fault. Or, as is more often the case, you hadn’t really thought it through.
I am obsessive about “watching” my scenes before I write them. That’s how I’m able to prattle at length when the 1st A.D. asks me for those details. Still, he catches me every now and then, and I’m forced to say something like, “Dammit.”
It’s a scary “dammit”, by the way. It’s like someone asking me where I was yesterday, and there’s a two-hour period I can’t account for. We’re supposed to know our stories inside and out.
The point is not that we must do this to prepare for production. We must do this because it’s what makes a screenplay worth producing. No one will make a movie that seems like it could be shot anywhere with anyone wearing anything. The more you know about your world, the more it affects the story you set in that world. Do yourselves a favor. Go through your scripts like they were someone else’s, and your job was to actually go and shoot it. The only information you have is what’s on the page.
Make a list of questions.
Answer them.
And when it’s your time to sit down across the 1st A.D., make me proud, wouldja?
Man, that felt like forever between posts… We know you’re busy, but please keep in mind we have some serious writers here with some serious procrastination to do… :-) Good post. Reminds me of how Callie Khouri said she could tell you what kind of toothpaste Thelma used… “She uses the kind with red, green, and blue stripes, whatever has the most color in it.” And thanks for the link to Josh Friedman’s site… It was both nice to know and disconcerting that top writers are treated with the same disrespect as beginning ones…
Of course, you are assuming that walking into the office building is integral to the story. I thought you were going to talk about dead scenes where nothing important happens.
Craig,
You’re obviously operating on a very high level at this point in your career, but how common is it really for the 1st AD to sit down with the writer and ask them production details like this?
Your advice is great even if this never happens, of course. You really SHOULD know the story inside and out and better than anyone else.
But I’m just curious - how frequently do these interactions happen and to what extent is the writer consulted about production details?
Peter,
Same exact thing happened to us on the sequel to the FAST AND THE FURIOUS. Every day.
We wrote in the script… “Brian has to go high in the turn, forcing Slap Jack even higher, off the street on to the sidewalk, almost hitting the wall of a warehouse.” The production designer and the 1st AD tracked us down on the set…
1 AD: Uh, guys, we have all of downtown Miami blocked off for the rest of the week for night shoots. The only problem, we can’t find a sidewalk next to a warehouse in downtown Miami.
Us: Umm… it doesn’t have to be a warehouse.
1 AD: But the script says, “almost hitting the wall of a warehouse.”
Us: …it could be “almost hitting the wall of a shoe store.”
1 AD: I’m on it!
Later in the process, we had to change the ending of the movie so the protagonists crash their car into a boat instead of a plane (too expensive as it turned out.) Michael and I sat in a meeting where every production head was in a room discussing which boat to purchase for end of the movie. After everyone had spoken, we stood up and said, “It has to be this boat, because of the script.” They looked at us, nodded, and purchased the boat.
Thanks, Derek! Very illuminating.
I guess my perceptions have been colored by tales of writers being shut out of the process once the script was turned in, about being banned from sets, etc.
I guess I just assumed a director would make all these decisions once pre-production and production were underway.
Well, that happens quite a bit too. We wrote this movie CATCH THAT KID which was rewritten quite a bit. Our total days on the set: one. Our contributions to the physical production: zero.
It can go either way.
How and when do you “speak up”?
My “thang” is SF, and honest to God Craig, I COULD supply “the 1st A.D. or the producer or the director with a document describing in detail my imagined locations, costumes, hair styles, car makes, and all the other tiny flecks of color in my neural painting�”.
Not only that I could go one for hours, or more probably days on end, explaining WHY those things look the way they do, how they work, how they came about, why they came about, .. the works.
Take locations. My “imagined locations” are very real to me. If I’ve got part of a story set on Mars, you can be sure I’ve spent time digging up true color (as opposed to false color) pictures of places that really exist on Mars. Why? ‘Cause I’m a nerd with a fixation on scientific accuracy? Nope. ‘Cause I’m a dramatist, and before I go to work writing characters interacting in an environment like that I need to see it in my own mind. I need to feel the rough pebbles under my feet. I have to be able to look at the sky and be able to tell if a dust storm is brewing. I need to be there, to convince myself that the environment I’m working in is real, long before I’m able to convince anybody else that the story environs are “real”.
I think about the costumes. Personally I just can’t bring myself to believe that people running around on Mars, or anyplace else, are going to be running around in crude bulky space suits every hour of every day of their lives, that have no sense of style or fashion. So what would those styles and fashions look like? How would they work? How would you go to the bathroom? What would kids wear? What would a mechanic wear, as opposed to a cop?
Hairstyles, differances between imagined car makes (the beat up equivilant of Columbo’s Volvo, or Magnum’s Ferrarii?), and all those other “tiny flecks of color in my neural painting” are things I need to be able to picture in my own mind, to convince myself that the world I’m working in is “real”, in order to be able to convince an audience that it’s “real”.
That said, how, when, and whom, do you make aware that you’ve already spent the time thinking these things through?
Interesting, and here I am being taught to generalize things and make them more generic, less brand namish-exact. I guess I should bend back a tad towards the other direction. Thanks for the post
Mike:
If I were you, what I’d do is write it all down. Call it a “bible” for your movie, and offer it to the production when the time comes. The important thing is to offer it not in the spirit of “do it this way” but rather in the spirit of “this might be helpful”.
“This might be helpful”
You know Craig, the more time I spend on your site, the more I’m coming to apreciate the attitude of “this might be helpful” as opposed to “do it this way” on the part of a writer. Thanks. The idea of a “bible” for a film is one that never even occured to me. It wouldn’t even be all that tough to put together. Just a day or two to put together six to eight pages would probably do it, and most of that already exists in the form of notes I made and things I’ve already gathered from various sources.
Again;
Thanks.
Mike
hi i need a job to do at home im handy cap person can u help me?
I’ve managed to save up roughly $11703 in my bank account, but I’m not sure if I should buy a house or not. Do you think the market is stable or do you think that home prices will decrease by a lot?